 |
| |
|
| |
Album Review
by SashaS
16-4-2004
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Mum: obscene Icelandic beauty nailed |
|
Múm: 'Summer Make Good'
(FatCat)
Múm restart Aesthetic Movement
There is no other way to write it but - Múm’s ‘Summer Make Good’ could well be the album of the year. It is such a huge portion of delicious, dark, arty, Artic weirdness, fly-overs of pastoral vista, tripping alongside the landscapes water-colourists strive to capture [despite gloved-but-frozen fingers, one imagines]… This disc is so bloody irresistible to make you contemplate solo-walking to the Pole or, at least, check out flights to Reykjavik on a cheapo airline’s site.
Plenty of albums are external experiences, and nought wrong with it, but when one deals with the inner parts - inside of souls, it touches most refined sense of irrational. It could be that this album is the product of its environment, there is huge tranquillity here, vast and endless trails to the furthest reaches of landmass, tonal-fictionalising the magnetism of inhospitable.
‘SMG’ is so beautiful, it should be framed and displayed in a museum. From the opening noises (whale ‘song’?) of ‘Hú hviss - A Ship’, it is like entering an enchanted world where minimal and dramatic settings almost combine to form a black’n’white but intense listening trip. By track two, ‘Weeping Rock, Rock’, icebergs are clashing, mashing-up into an industrial mess that is putrefying the planet. About two-and-a-half minutes into the track, the miraculous voice of Kristin Anna Valtysdottir arrives to spellbound you onto the cross of lust.
‘SMG’ is fragile, if should be protected by an endangered species law: this is a pearl that needs to be nurtured, cultivated and preserved because it is just beyond - mundane. Breathy vocal of this woman is a potent weapon of individual destruction - subliminally erotic, ponderously appealing, pensively sexy.
‘SMG’ is so mysterious - it should carry a health warning. Deep down this is folk music gone idiosyncratic: French soundtracky, orchestral, poppy, torchy, plaintive, even - tragic but eternally classy and gracious. There are echoes of Japanese and African cultures, it could have been a jazz chord there… It is also sans frontieres, otherworldly, behind outer limits, beyond any standard you can point at.
This is the outfit’s third album and employing electronica - in the slenderest sense possible although there are moments where they up-tempo as well as unleash SFX noises - suits the songs perfectly. Mesmeric quality is contained within these odes to… nature. By the track that provides the title - ‘Will The Summer Make Good for All of Our Sins?’ - I’ve parted with reasoning and surrendered to this like a democrat to a freedom ideal.
Let’s re-start Aesthetic Movement and make this lot our favourite ‘false idols’… Sure, ‘Summer Make Good’ but the truth is that it is only April and the year feels like it’s been made good, already.
9/10
SashaS
9-9-2004
Mum’s album ‘Summer Make Good’ is released 12 April 2004 by FatCat/PIAS
|
|
|
